30 days in November 5...

Come on chaps, stiff upper lip and all that and if you can’t beat ‘em, well…

After all, today is:

Men Make dinner Day

Apparently this day (November 5th, Bonfire Night, Treason and Plot as it used to be called before The Investigatory Powers Bill) is dedicated to all men who can’t really cook but need to try, a day that comes with a whole list of dos and don’ts. Some of the rules include no interference (help) by the women in the kitchen, no TV (even football) during cooking, and definitely no beer until the meal is in the oven.

But are you a reluctant cooker or are you one of those men that cook for the ladies not, as many women do to get through to your heart via your stomach, but more as a way to gain entry into her more intimate affections?  One of the new generation of men who see cooking more as a hobby than a household chore and hone their kitchen prowess to impress friends and prospective partners?

In short: Are you a ‘Gastrosexual’?

Women love a man that can cook. Gone are the days where the man brought home the mammoth and the woman roasted it on the fire. These days the man catches the mammoth, fillets it, soaks it overnight in a marinade and then tosses it with lemongrass and wild mushrooms before adding crème fraiche and serving in warm bowls with a little pasta.

Yes, things are hotting up in the kitchen as men turn to cooking as a way to attract women. According to one study, 48 per cent of women say being able to cook makes a man more attractive to them, with 23 per cent of 18-34 year old men saying they cook only as an attempt to seduce a partner.

Now I thought that was what the wine was for. But the report also shows that 60 per cent of British men now regularly cook for friends and family, favouring complicated foreign dishes (curries and the like) over traditional British food with over half of those men preparing meals from separate ingredients (not ping-and-ding ready meals) every day, spending an average of 41 minutes whipping up some culinary delight daily.

Of course men have always made the Sunday gravy and no self-respecting male hands over the tongs of the barbecue to his missus. But the number of families where men help in the kitchen has risen from almost 0 per cent before the war (carving the joint excluded) to 27.5 per cent in the post war period to 66.5 per cent back in 2008. Now, in 2015, there's hardly a man alive who doesn't have his own egg separator and who can't whip up a pretty good five course meal in a jiffy.

Of course I blame all those celebrity chefs for this situation. These days the likes of Gordon Ramsey and Jamie Oliver have made making a bit of dinner into some sort of male tribal war ritual. All of them, from Gino D'Acampo to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Rick Stein, not only cook their food in buckets and piles of bricks in the rain outside, but often breed, forage for, and sometimes kill the animals and vegetables they are cooking themselves. And of course they do all this whilst wielding large knives in exotic far-flung corners of the world - like Italy.

Maybe it’s a Mafia thing - 'I'm gonna make you some offal you can't refuse'.